Jorge Rios

Bridgefy, CEO

Jorge Rios

Bridgefy, CEO

Biography

Jorge is one of the co-founders of www.bridgefy.me. Bridgefy is a mobile communications technology that enables apps like Whatsapp, Uber, and Facebook Messenger to be used without Internet or phone services. He is in charge of fundraising, strategy, and team management.

During the time that Bridgefy went through its early phases in 2015, Jorge managed to raise $425,000 USD pre-product in order to build a rockstar engineer team, with an additional $25,000 USD obtained from winning first place at Twitter Hatch 2015.

Since launching their test messaging app, Bridgefy has broken through the 25,000 organic downloads mark, positioning it several times on the most downloaded apps in Mexico during Corona Capital, Hurricane Patricia, and Festival Pa’l Norte.

He was named one of E/100 Top 100 Mexican Entrepreneurs in 2014, winner of the 2015 Gifted Citizen Award in 2015, and recently included in Geektime’s 10 Key Mexican Entrepreneurs list. He currently sits on the Board of StartupBus, an international hackathon organization with over 1,500 participants and an ever-growing community. He has written for TechCrunch and gotten positive response from Mexican entrepreneurs and not-so-positive responses from Mexican VCs, specially those he indirectly called out in his article.

Before learning what a startup was, he completed his MBA at Universidad de Monterrey while he worked as projects coordinator for the city of San Pedro Garza Garcia, in Nuevo Leon, Mexico. He then applied and participated with his previous startup, Twitt2Go, for Naranya Labs’ 1st batch.

He’s currently 30, although he mentions that won’t last long. He likes to watch fishing shows although he’s only gone fishing twice when he was 10 years old. He constantly and unknowingly quotes Calvin & Hobbes, and is terrible at describing himself without blushing.